Unfortunately, my mom can’t really engage in meaningful conversations anymore, but many people suffering with dementia retain much of their conversational abilities as their illness progresses. However, the shame and frustration that many dementia sufferers experience often make routine, everyday talks with even close family members challenging. That’s why Russian technology company Endurance developed its companion chatbot.
“Bots go bust” — so went the first of the five AI startup predictions in 2017 by Bradford Cross, countering some recent excitement around conversational AI (see for example O’Reilly’s “Why 2016 is shaping up to be the Year of the Bot”). The main argument was that social intelligence, rather than artificial intelligence is lacking, rendering bots utilitarian and boring.
Malicious chatbots are frequently used to fill chat rooms with spam and advertisements, by mimicking human behaviour and conversations or to entice people into revealing personal information, such as bank account numbers. They are commonly found on Yahoo! Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger and other instant messaging protocols. There has also been a published report of a chatbot used in a fake personal ad on a dating service's website.[44]
There are NLP services and applications programming interfaces that are used to build the chatbots and make it possible for all type of businesses, small. Medium and large scale. The main point here is that Smart Bots have the potential to help increase your customer base by improving the customer support services and as a result boosts the sales as well as profits. They are an opportunity for many small and mid-sized companies to reach a huge customer base.
H&M’s consistent increased sales over the past year and its August announcement to launch an eCommerce presence in Canada and South Korea during the fall of 2016, along with 11 new H&M online markets (for a total of 35 markets by the end of the year), appear to signify positive results for its chatbot implementation (though direct correlations are unavailable on its website).
Since 2016 when Facebook allows businesses to deliver automated customer support, e-commerce guidance, content and interactive experiences through chatbots, a large variety of chatbots for Facebook Messenger platform were developed.[35] In 2016, Russia-based Tochka Bank launched the world's first Facebook bot for a range of financial services, in particularly including a possibility of making payments. [36] In July 2016, Barclays Africa also launched a Facebook chatbot, making it the first bank to do so in Africa. [37]
Keep it conversational: Chatbots help make it easy for users to find the information they need. Users can ask questions in a conversational way, and the chatbots can help them refine their searches through their responses and follow-up questions. Having had substantial experience with personal assistants on their smartphones and elsewhere, users today expect this level of informal interaction. When chatbot users are happy, the organizations employing the chatbots benefit.

As AOL's David Shingy writes in Adweek, "The challenge [with chatbots] will be thinking about creative from a whole different view: Can we have creative that scales? That customizes itself? We find ourselves hurtling toward another handoff from man to machine -- what larger system of creative or complex storytelling structure can I design such that a machine can use it appropriately and effectively?"

One pertinent field of AI research is natural language processing. Usually, weak AI fields employ specialized software or programming languages created specifically for the narrow function required. For example, A.L.I.C.E. utilises a markup language called AIML, which is specific to its function as a conversational agent, and has since been adopted by various other developers of, so called, Alicebots. Nevertheless, A.L.I.C.E. is still purely based on pattern matching techniques without any reasoning capabilities, the same technique ELIZA was using back in 1966. This is not strong AI, which would require sapience and logical reasoning abilities.
“Bots go bust” — so went the first of the five AI startup predictions in 2017 by Bradford Cross, countering some recent excitement around conversational AI (see for example O’Reilly’s “Why 2016 is shaping up to be the Year of the Bot”). The main argument was that social intelligence, rather than artificial intelligence is lacking, rendering bots utilitarian and boring.
There are a bunch of e-commerce stores taking advantage of chatbots as well. One example that I was playing with was from Fynd that enables you to ask for specific products and they'll display them to you directly within Messenger. What's more, Facebook even allows you to make payments via Messenger bots, opening up a whole world of possibility to e-commerce stores.

[In] artificial intelligence ... machines are made to behave in wondrous ways, often sufficient to dazzle even the most experienced observer. But once a particular program is unmasked, once its inner workings are explained ... its magic crumbles away; it stands revealed as a mere collection of procedures ... The observer says to himself "I could have written that". With that thought he moves the program in question from the shelf marked "intelligent", to that reserved for curios ... The object of this paper is to cause just such a re-evaluation of the program about to be "explained". Few programs ever needed it more.

I argued that it is super hard to scale a one-trick TODA into a general assistant that helps the user getting things done across multiple tasks. An intelligence assistant is arguably expected to hold an informal chit-chat with the user. It is this area where we are staring into perhaps the biggest challenge of AI. Observe how Samantha introduces herself to Joaquin Phoenix’s Ted in the clip below:
Since 2016 when Facebook allows businesses to deliver automated customer support, e-commerce guidance, content and interactive experiences through chatbots, a large variety of chatbots for Facebook Messenger platform were developed.[35] In 2016, Russia-based Tochka Bank launched the world's first Facebook bot for a range of financial services, in particularly including a possibility of making payments. [36] In July 2016, Barclays Africa also launched a Facebook chatbot, making it the first bank to do so in Africa. [37]